Yahoo blocked e-mails about Wall Street protests

Yahoo apologized yesterday after people using its e-mail service were prevented from sending messages about anti-Wall Street demonstrations over the weekend.

The company said that an external spam filter had blocked the messages but maintained that it was inadvertent. It said that the problem has since been resolved, though there may be some residual issues.

After typing in to the text field a message suggesting a visit to the Occupywallstreet.org Web site for more on the protests, the system kicked back the following message:

Your message was not sent
Suspicious activity has been detected on your account. To protect your account and our users, your message has not been sent.
If this error continues, please contact Yahoo! Customer Care for further help.
We apologize for the inconvenience.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo said that the company had not purposely blocked the messages. She said Yahoo initially became aware on Sunday "that some folks sending e-mail were getting the weird bounceback" but that Yahoo has since taken steps to resolve the problem.